Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday July 01, 2013 @09:03PM
from the ftc-to-the-rescue dept.

ectoman writes "In a recent policy speech, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez indicated that the FTC might be preparing to seriously address patent abuse in the United States. Mark Bohannon, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Global Public Policy at Red Hat, has reviewed Ramirez's remarks, calling them 'some of the most direct and specific to date from a senior U.S. Government official regarding "harmful PAE [patent assertion entities] activities."' Bohannon writes that the FTC's proposed roadmap for patent reform 'is both ambitious and doable,' and he discusses how the agency could make its potential contributions to reforms most effective. The piece arrives one week after Bohannon analyzed other patent reform efforts currently ongoing in Washington—in a piece Slashdot readers have been discussing."

Patents are more and more being used as weapons to stop any and all progress of any derivative idea that results from the base idea being patented. The system has been corrupted to stop many inventions that could save lives, and overall better happiness of mankind for the sake of the patent holders keeping their money-making works owned by their masters... FOREVER.

How can the patent process be used to give influence to create new ideas, works. There is none! no new antibiotics, no cures for illnesses, no new chemicals no nothing as long as the patent process is corrupted the way it is!

One of the abuses with patents is the continuous application for patents on the same area with minor adjustments on previous patents in order to essentially prevent the original invention patented from being free from patents once the initial one has expired.

It's certainly more limited in scope because they can't just wait until the initial patent is almost expired, but it is a problem that could easily be solved if examiners were willing to say that minor alterations do not a new invention make.

One of the abuses with patents is the continuous application for patents on the same area with minor adjustments on previous patents in order to essentially prevent the original invention patented from being free from patents once the initial one has expired.

And it isn't just minor adjustments, we have patenting of "processes" (that are really just practices or activities), or patenting results rather than means, or obvious methods to those "skilled in the art".

The patent system was suposed to help the smaller inventor get his idea going before the rich person out manuvered him on the inventors own idea. Now, the inventor cannot afford a patent; cannot afford to assert his patent; Cannot defend against patents without the help of the rich man. Most patents are assigned to the rich. It is rare to be both the inventor and the assignee. If you invent something, you need a rich guy (vulture capitalist) to fund what you are doing if you want to stand a chance a

Let me illustrate this with actual examples [arstechnica.com] where patent trolls sued small businesses for using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail.

The Project Paperless via AdzPro letter-writing campaign is a kind of lowest-common-denominator patent demand. Patent-licensing companies are going after the users of everyday technology rather than their traditional targets, the tech companies that actually make technology. Smaller and smaller companies are being targeted....Project Paperless and its progeny don’t have any interest in going after the Canons and the Xeroxes of the world. After all, they have patent lawyers on payroll already and are in a far better position to push back. Project Paperless' spawn—AdzPro, AllLed, GosNel, and the others listed above—exemplify the new strategy. They send out vast quantities of letters, mainly to businesses that never could have imagined they’d be involved in any kind of patent dispute. They send them from anonymous and ever-changing shell companies. And at the end of the day, they either file only a few lawsuits—as Project Paperless did—or none at all, which has been the AdzPro strategy thus far.

“Going after the end users may ultimately be more lucrative for them,” said one patent litigator at a technology company that's closely monitoring the AdzPro situation. “If they extract a small amount from each possible end user, the total amount might well end up being a much larger sum than they could ever get from the manufacturers. The ultimate pot of gold could end up being much bigger."

In typical patent troll style, these shell companies (with names like AdzPro, FanPar, and HunLos) are asking businesses and users for a few thousand dollars—far less than what litigation would cost—as a licensing fee for using this basic technology. Unwilling or unable to lawyer up, most choose the more convenient route of settling...Over the past few years, we saw Lodsys threaten and sue a number of app developers for using technologies provided that companies like Apple and Google require their app developers to use. More recently, a patent troll called Innovatio has been suing restaurants, hotels, and companies for using WiFi. Yes, that’s right. WiFi.

My point is twofold: 1) Patents are being abused by patent trolls, who do not create, nor provide any incentive to creators and 2) Patent abuse is spreading to cause great distress to the general public. I'm sure that some of these businesses, when threatened, would opt to forgo the use of technologies such as scanners, WIFI etc. Scaring people off with frivolous lawsuits from using technology that could improve their performance, efficiency, efficacy or make their lives better is blocking progress.

Copyright relates to works regarding mostly publication and display.Trademarks relate to logos, names, slogans, and such.Patents relate to inventions. You make a good point, but your example is inadequate.

That you took the fact it took hundreds of cases and decades before he was prosecuted for bankruptcy fraud doesn't mean the system works. He won plenty before he started losing. He was just too insane to stop.

Yes, that is the nature of patents, but you have to admit that they are far better than copyrights. Patents only deny humankind of advances for 20 years or so, copyrights prevent others from building upon previous work for lifetimes plus more.

The music industry is a good example of that. With a single song you have a copyright for the owner of the musical score and a copyright for the owner of the lyrics (not necessarily the creators of the music and lyrics or the same owner for both). If anyone performs the song, you would need to pay a license fee to the owners for 75 years beyond the death of the author in some cases (often the owner had nothing to do with creating the music and none of the licensing fees go to the real artists or their fam

If you read her policy speech, her focus is on the need to rein in "Patent Assertion Entities" ("PAE"), defined as "a firm with a business model focused primarily on purchasing and asserting patents". And she talks about solutions such as making it easier/cheaper to defend against frivolous lawsuits etc.

She does not appear to address, or even acknowledge the key underlying problem with the patent system, namely that right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents. All the powers the patent trolls have stem from the patents they are granted. Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows.

This will not only cut out the PAEs, but also lessen the ability of legitimate companies to kill off their competition by abusing their patents, such as when Samsung/Apple/HTC/Huawei/Motorola try to block the importation/sale of each other's products on the basis of patents.

But Commission activity should be just one piece of a broader response. Flaws in the patent system are likely fueling much of the real costs associated with PAE activities. PAEs are good at monetizing patents. But effective monetization of low quality patents imposes a de facto tax on productive economic activity with little or no offsetting benefit for consumers

But Commission activity should be just one piece of a broader response. Flaws in the patent system are likely fueling much of the real costs associated with PAE activities. PAEs are good at monetizing patents. But effective monetization of low quality patents imposes a de facto tax on productive economic activity with little or no offsetting benefit for consumers

Expecting that parliament of whores, the US House, to pass anything meaningful while they wring their hands over how it might reduce their campaign warchests by $1 million, or less, is like believing the Tooth Faerie exists.

Bingo. So often when you read the backstories of the biggest patent trolls, you find out that the key patent at the heart of the battle is one that was issued to a legitimate inventor and was later sold. The patents that were never that good to begin with tend to be the ones that get invalidated at the first sign of resistance.

Bingo. So often when you read the backstories of the biggest patent trolls, you find out that the key patent at the heart of the battle is one that was issued to a legitimate inventor and was later sold. The patents that were never that good to begin with tend to be the ones that get invalidated at the first sign of resistance.

most of the time they don't seem so good or novel patents.. if they were they would have been sold to an operating entity and not a patent troll - and inventor being some dude who swapped "with a cassette" to "with a computer"..

A lot of the time they are sold to an operating entity...who happens to go bankrupt for other reasons and then sells it to a patent troll. I've read a few different articles about just that sort of thing happening, though I'll admit I can't think of the examples off the top of my head.

What if the patent is entirely worthwhile and then sold to a troll?...All patents = bad is not driving the conversation forward.

Wow. Did you even read? My argument was, in bold mind you, "...right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents...Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows." Show me where it says all patents are bad.

And as for those tech companies "abusing their patents" do you have a cite for abuse versu

They never will. Too many people work on too many pieces, even Microsoft's source code was leaked. And once leaked, without copyright, they wouldn't be able to even pretend to put the genie in the bottle.

As the FTC noted, patent trolls have become a serious problem IN RECENT YEARS. The patent system worked rather well for a few hundred years. Just recently there have been problems big enough, often enough, to offset the benefits.

What that tells me is that some things need to be fixed.Throwing out a system that worked so well for so long would be dumb. That would be like trying to reduce the cost of medical care by getting rid of doctors.

Eh, even back in the days of the steam engine and the cotton gin and before it was hardly a clear cut benefit to the general welfare. It's just become more and more destructive as the pace of technological advance has increased, that's all.

This is the standard assumption, but totally unfounded. I suggest the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly", which looks at hard economic analyses of the effects of patents. The theory that patents are necessary to incentivize capitalization is not supported by the empirical evidence. The only area where empirical evidence tends to show patents are necessary is to recoup development costs of pharmaceuticals. But drugs patents are only neces

The only area where empirical evidence tends to show patents are necessary is to recoup development costs of pharmaceuticals. But drugs patents are only necessary to cover the marginal cost of adhering to strict government protocols; arguably we'd have a net social health benefit by relaxing the protocols, relaxing patents, and allowing more and cheaper drugs to reach the market.

I don't know about that. More drugs doesn't necessarily mean better drugs. Successfully navigating the government protocols also frees a drug maker of significant liability. Would or should drug makers still enjoy that freedom from liability if they haven't gone through the FDA approval process?

Personally, I think any relaxation in phase III clinical trials should be accompanied by strict requirements to run post-approval trials for efficacy and safety.

Think about that for a second. You want to trade the pace of progress in the sciences and useful arts that we've had for the last 300 years for the rate of progress for two thousand years before that? Really?Three hundred years ago, 1713, life was much the same as it was in 300 BC. Our quality of life has improved so much more in the last few hundred years than it improved in the thousands of years before. Are you really wanting to go back to the days when everyone just worried about feeding themselves,

Agreed, in 1850, people were using thousand year old technology for the most part , so a twenty year lead was reasonable.
These days, 3 years might give a roughly equivalent advantage. The only problem is, since the patent office is government bureaucracy, it takes three years for them to approve it.

You seriously contribute *everything* humanity has ever done in the last 300 years to patents? Are you serious? Patents are a tool, nothing else. And more recently they've been a tool of choice for abuse, encouraging stagnation by being used as a weapon against everyone else even for the most obvious ideas. And fucking math, for that matter. They are less needed than ever before, especially in software--they just never really worked well for software. But certainly software is not the only area that needs a

> You seriously contribute *everything* humanity has ever done in the last 300 years to patents? Are you serious?

No, the person I replied to attributed the fast paced progress a thousand years ago to the LACK of patents.I pointed that progress has accelerated greatly since patents began to be commonly used, so he was wrongto say that the creation of patents a few hundred years ago caused progress to stop.

Additionally, in places where patents were strong, such as the US, those were exactly the places doin

No, the person I replied to attributed the fast paced progress a thousand years ago to the LACK of patents.I pointed that progress has accelerated greatly since patents began to be commonly used, so he was wrongto say that the creation of patents a few hundred years ago caused progress to stop.

Ah, I see. It must have been a slight misunderstanding.

Additionally, in places where patents were strong, such as the US, those were exactly the places doing most of theinvention in the last 300 years. (Of course the US lead in innovation had begun to wither in the last 25 years or so.)

I think this is nothing more than a coincidence. I wouldn't attribute it to patents.

Which is my point. Recently, in the last 5-10 years or so, certain people have started abusing them in a specific way.

I think it's been going on for much longer than the last 5-10 years. It's just that in that time, the abuse has just increased heavily, to downright ridiculous proportions. But it is most definitely not something that started, or even started to get bad, just ten years ago. It was already being abused pretty badly before that--just not on the scale that it is now.

Additionally, in places where patents were strong, such as the US, those were exactly the places doing most of the
invention in the last 300 years. (Of course the US lead in innovation had begun to wither in the last 25 years or so.)

And I thought it the opposite. The US patent system was weak in the 1800s. The US didn't recognize foreign patents, so people would "discover" something in the US that was already discovered elsewhere. Hollywoodland was in the west, far from the patent and copyright enforcers. China has weak patents and has caught up to the US and others quickly, and is starting to pass us in many things. Abolishing patents now will bring a renaissance of innovation and progress. Within a few years of Velcro, a "bette

Republicans yea aint much better, but recently they least been trying to cut the "spend now worry about how to pay for it later" democrat ploy.

What Republicans have you been looking at? They are borrow and spend, which is all about worrying about how to pay for it later. The Democrats are tax and spend, which matches paying for it with spending it. The current administration has been particularly bad about borrow and spend because the Republicans aren't interested in holding down expenses, but fight every tax resolution tooth and nail. So up go expenses, and up goes borrowing.

Software is almost entirely a mathematical construct. We dont allow patenting mathematical constructs because they are far too logical and replicable. Anyone looking to do the same thing will logically take the same path with no knowledge of any prior art.

So you dont understand patents, software or more likely, both.

Patents are meant to encourage innovation by providing a limited monopoly. The key words in there are "encourage" and "limited". Patents are not meant to provide a means of extorting other businesses nor are they meant to last for ever. The price of the limited monopoly is that the patent passes into the public domain after a set number of years. Patents are also required to be unique, code is too easily replicated by someone with no knowledge of the patented code to meet this requirement.

Then at we'd be back to enjoying the benefits of the system that worked rather well for hundreds of years.

LoL, you also dont know your history.

Patent systems are radically different to the systems you claim "worked" and we haven't had the same system for 100's of years. The current iteration started around 50 years ago with most of the abusive changes added in the last 20.

Patent systems are radically different to the systems you claim "worked" and we haven't had the same system for 100's of years. The current iteration started around 50 years ago with most of the abusive changes added in the last 20.

They might be changed substantially, but they've been abused heartily for hundreds of years.

The whole "yeah but on a computer^W^Wthe internet^Wcloud" patents used to be "yeah but on a steam engine".

No kidding.

Look up some pictures of an old Watt steam engine. Note the rather odd

And abandon patents and copyright on mathematics and natural phenomenon. Monsanto can patent a manner of injecting bacterial DNA into corn, but not the sequence of either component or the result, nor copyright it and prosecute people who "find" it later.

I can't figure out why the powers that be seem to care about patent trolls now. Big corps used to love them because it kept upstarts like google from upending whole industries. Investors didn't seem to mind them since like bookies they make their money either way so long as the market stays reasonable stable. The only ppl I know that get the short end are little guys like me.

Two things happened.
1. The patent trolls are no longer in just the tech industry. Major retailers etc. that can make a lot of noise are now under attack. These are companies that themselves hold no/few patents and thus have no interest in holding the status quo the way major tech companies do.
2. The situation has gotten so wildly out of control at this point that even mega corps are no longer benefiting from it.

Right now even big companies are spending tens and hundreds of millions of dollars fighting these trolls. Patent Trolling is a multi billion dollar industry.billions that are costing even big companies like microsoft enough money to show up on upper management's radar.

The corporations with lots of money and lots of patents are making lots of money. The lawyers are making lots and lots of money. Fuck inventors! So what's the problem? Oh, and if you actually look at fixing things, know that patents on software should have remained illegal, patents must actually do something non-obvious, and while you are at it, copyrights are more fucked than patents: 20 years (1 generation) should be the term limit, and if its sold, the time should be cut in half.

Compaines are filing patents and then forming subsidiaries in tax haven countires. The companies licence the patent to the subsidiary and book all the profits in that low tax country. The companies then just show operating losses in the US.